Dallas – If you are what you eat, then I am a Twinkie. I am high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated shortening and refined white flour. I am also an absolute, unadulterated show-off. I would tell you the ingredients of a hot dog, but I don’t want you to spit up your cranberry muffin.
Besides, who knows what is in an actual hot dog? And is it better to hide the ingredients inside an inch-thick coat of fried dough? I do know one thing, however, after dining all morning recently here at the Texas State Fair.
I am absolutely fried. In more ways than one.
Think war correspondents have it tough? Try being a traveling food columnist eating breakfast at the Texas State Fair. It’s like eating your own colon. I don’t know who did better business, the carny who ran the Ferris wheel or the guy next to him at the Guess My Cholesterol booth.
I’m not a carnival junkie. I’m still recovering from my hometown’s Lane County Fair in 1969 when I lost my allowance and my lunch on the Rock-o- Plane.
This time I was in Dallas covering the Oklahoma-Texas football game at the Cotton Bowl, which is on the fairgrounds and no place to build an appetite for unhealthy food.
The Cotton Bowl, built in 1930 and still featuring the original plumbing, looks like a filthy ashtray you’d find in a bus station in Bakersfield, Calif. The peeling paint looks like the entire stadium is covered in smoke stains. Sit in the bleachers, and you immediately feel like a homeless person.
Walking the grounds before game time is a tradition. You look at the food and marvel at what revolting things they can do to already revolting food. But you don’t eat there. This time I did.
I passed on the food court, although, gee, it was difficult pulling myself away from the broccoli puffs. Instead, I ventured toward one of the standards of the Texas State Fair or fairs from Barstow to Bangor: the corny dog stand.
The whole concept of a corn dog makes no sense. You take a gross American diet staple of dubious origins and dip it into deep-fat fryer and cover it in molten bread. The minute I bit into it I wondered what I saw in corn dogs before my Rock-o- Plane ride in ’69.
The wiener inside wasn’t roasted. It was boiled. It was the pink, pale color you’d find on raw bacon. The bread served as a coagulator because, somehow, that wiener solidified in my stomach as one big tube again – like that tiny monster in “Alien.”
Hoping the thing wouldn’t pop out of my stomach and start screaming, I walked on. Now when you eat unhealthy food, a certain order is recommended. You start with meat, or whatever a corndog is, and work your way up to dessert. It’s crucial in anything involved with gorging.
Five years ago I saw a guy drink 17 straight shots in the Philippines. He went from strongest to weakest and was fine. Another guy ended his run with tequila, and last I heard a week ago he was still face down in the sand.
But for convenience, you can line up alcohol. You can’t line up fair food. So the next food stand on my target list I walked by just happened to be the – and I am not making this up – fried Twinkie. If there is an unhealthier food to begin with than the Twinkie, please alert the FDA.
It is basically spongy, yellow cake filled with artificial white cream. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
I found it at a stand called Katie’s Café where they put a stick in a Twinkie and fry it in tempura batter for three minutes. They pull it out and cover it in chocolate sauce or a sauce mix of strawberry, blueberry and raspberry.
It’s not as bad as it sounds. Then again, it sounds pretty awful. Picture a light soggy dough with a sweet, soft filling inside. “It’s like a beignet in New Orleans, but it’s not quite a beignet,” said Katie Maher, the owner who sold 15,000 fried Twinkies last year.
It was invented by one Christopher Sell, an Englishman who runs a fish ‘n chips shop in Brooklyn and experimented with his fryer. The New York Times picked it up (on a real slow news day) and Hostess ran with it. Then Maher tried it. Using Twinkies is certainly convenient.
“They have a shelf life of 20 years,” she said, “not that I’ve kept one around that long.”
I next visited an inventor whom, initially, I wanted locked up for frying an Oreo cookie. Michael Terrazas grew up in West Covina, Calif., where his father worked in the dessert business. He liked to experiment.
“Oreos were always my favorite since I was a kid,” Terrazas said. “It turned out pretty good.”
I hate to admit it, but he’s right. The dough melts the hard black outer cookie right into the glorious white filling . Cover it in powdered sugar and you have a nice snack – that lasts an entire football game and beyond. Texans must love them. First, Terrazas sold 50,000 cookies at his Country Cravings booth ; second, many Texans at the fair outweighed their offensive linemen.
I finished my gluttonous trek with another Texas State Fair staple: the Texas-Sized Smoked Turkey Leg. It’s the size of a linebacker’s. I think I saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex eating one in “Jurassic Park.”
When I returned to the press box with my turkey leg in hand, a colleague looked at me and said, “Hey, it’s Hagar the Sportswriter!” No, it’s Fryer John. You can’t be a Twinkie and brave the Texas State Fair.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
